Physical Emotions

“Not because he was afraid. Not at all. He was just cold. And he didn’t want to touch anything.”

This passage is referring to the sheriff’s reaction when they found Sethe with the dead baby. Sethe had just killed her baby and injured her other children by using a saw in the shed they were hiding in from the slave catchers. The part of this that stands out, is that the sheriff does not connect the physical sensations he is feeling to the emotions. The cold he is feeling in all reality is derived from the emotions that he is unable to process in the moment as anything but “cold”.  Emotions according to Psychology Today are processed in the same area of the brain as pain is. These areas are the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (Psychology Today). This shows that physical sensations have a connection to emotional feelings. To protect himself the sheriff denies the fact that he felt fear. In seeing a women holding a bloody baby with bloody children on the floor at her feet it is a normal reaction to feel fear. The two sentences “Not because he was afraid. Not at all.”  sound like the internal dialogue of the sheriff. If he said these things out loud it was to convince himself that he was not scared. This is a form of self soothing that is common after a traumatic event. Not wanting to touch anything is another aspect of this passage. As stated by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, one of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is hyper-arousal. This would explain him not wanting to be touched or to touch anything. He also felt the need to leave the situation. His body reacted physically to the situation. This is all accurate to today’s psychology and what would realistically happen to an individual who had experienced this event. Overall this book goes in depth into post traumatic stress disorder, and is based off of it. Even Sethe’s reaction to kill her children was driven by PTSD. The motivation for this was so that they would never have to go to Sweet Home. She did it to protect her children from the life she had back in slavery. Her desperation to save them shows an intense maternal instinct as well as the characteristic of PTSD that causes fear to be uncontrollable. Her actions psychologically make sense even though they are such drastic measures she takes to protect her children.